Back Issues: Cincinnati Chili

In this week’s issue, Jeffrey Toobin writes about Edward’s, a restaurant in Tribeca owned by Ohio native Edward Youkilis. Once a month, Youkilis presides over Cincinnati Night, featuring delicacies imported from the Queen City, including Skyline Chili.

This is not the first time the foods of Ohio have been featured in The New Yorker. In 1973, Calvin Trillin wrote a U.S. Journal about the state called “Gourmets and Eaters.” Trillin begins his piece by laying out the culinary pecking order among Ohio’s cities:

Columbus is not known as the gourmet center of Ohio. Ordinarily, anyone in Columbus who wants to take a serious fling at haute cuisine goes to Cincinnati. I have met people in Columbus who regularly drive the two hours to Cincinnati for dinner, stay the night, find some way to occupy themselves until lunchtime the next day, eat lunch, and return to Columbus—fortified against another five or six weeks of deprivation.

But pretty quickly after that, Trillin gets down to the business at hand: chili.

To an out-of-towner, the chili in various Cincinnati chili parlors may seem pretty much alike—less violent than Texas chili, it has a taste that is almost sweet—but there are natives who have stayed up late at night arguing about the relative merits of Empress and Skyline or explaining that the secret of eating at the downtown Empress is to arrive when the chili is at its freshest, which happens to be about nine in the morning.
_The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.

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